Sunday, October 26, 2014

Jack Kelly today finally talks about the income gap with "Jack Kelly / Obama’s Raw Deal Oligarchs benefit as the middle class lags". However, as Mr Kelly gets into it, he immediately reverts to form and suggests that Obama'a most important policies are somehow the very ones benefiting the wealthy when in fact they are the ones which particularly benefit the poor and middle class. Kelly goes on to this incredibly hypotritical attack on wealthy Democrats, as if somehow they don't deserve their money.

As I often do, I commented on Mr Kelly's column. My comments are below:

Mr Kelly talks about how President Obama's hypocritical remarks can not be topped, yet Mr Kelly then goes on to make some incredibly hypocritical remarks himself.

Yes, Jack Kelly has finally decided to notice that the Obama administration has been pretty good to Wall Street. Paul Krugman, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Reich, Elizabeth Warren and others have been saying that for years (watch Charles Ferguson's "Inside Job" and note the date ... or don't and stay in your bubble) and wonder where conservatives like Jack Kelly have been. When Mr Kelly provides us with *policies* he identifies as helping Wall Street and/or wealth Democrats, he mentions the stimulus, the ACA and Obama's blocking of the Keystone XL pipeline. These are patently ridiculous examples, and show that Mr Kelly real concern is with making the poor even poorer (and wrecking the environment).

The interesting thing is that after so many conservative commenters and Republican politicians have screeched that Democrats/liberals engage in class warfare, Mr Kelly proceeded to imply that liberal millionaires don't deserve their money. Mr Kelly follows the footsteps of Pat Buchanan, who in 1996 ran for President partly using income inequality as part of his shtick. We should all know exactly how well that worked out. Now, too, Mr Kelly does get some numbers right, but mostly seems small and petty. Mr Kelly mentions the difference in middle class contributions to the national economy between 1970 and 2012. I assume that was inadvertent since it was Reagan who many economists credit with starting the increase in the rate of the income gap, and starting the stagnation of middle class wage stagnation at the median.

I think most Democrats would agree with Cornell West that there is a problem here, and those who have been talking about it for years are glad national attention is being focused on it. However, we also know that Mr *Obama* himself is also not wrong about the consequences of the Republicans taking control of the Senate. and finally we know that while Obama is responsible for the lack of prosecution of Wall Street bankers, Republican obstructionism is also primarily responsible for the growing income gap.